Reusable Systems

Short one before the weekend guys. 😉 Something that I have been very focused on in the early days of developing STASIS (yes, these are still early days!) is creating systems that will be easily implimented later on in the game. The thing that I enjoy most in the creation process is being able to loose myself in the levels, and in the story. There is something freeing about thinking of a puzzle, feature, or location, and being able to see it in all its 2D, working glory, without the fuss of tinkering with 400 different values, and background logic.

If something takes a long time to set up, one of two things happen.

1, I get frustrated, and try to find an ‘easier’ (and often less cool) way around the setup, or

2, I get completely bogged down in the details of trying to get something to work, loosing out on valuable time that is better spent actually MAKING the game.

.

SO! I have set out to create systems that are very easy to implement. Right now there are 2 systems in place that are 100% fully functional, and require NO setup time. The Schematic Goggles, and Hawkings Remote Terminal Interface.

Now, if any puzzle I need requires you to work out the inner workings of a machine, or connect directly to a computer terminal, I can set that up in a few clicks. This greatly frees me up to work on making the game ‘flow’, allows me to focus on the story, the dialog, the atmosphere.

I have a few other systems in mind, the idea being that eventually it will be easy to set up rather complex puzzles, with the captain having a wide variety of tools at his disposal.